Truth: Stranger than fiction? Often, and well-written history books mean we understand a little bit more about how we got here. From a massive selection, here are a few that would make great gifts for the history buffs in your life:

Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China by Leslie Chang. Speigel & Grau, $26. Technically, this is super-recent history, but we predict this well-documented and spellbinding narrative will serve as a lasting record of one of the largest mass migrations the world has ever seen.

American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA by Nick Taylor. Bantam Books, $27.The book’s other subtitle is “When FDR Put the Nation to Work,” and we sure hope President-elect Obama is reading this superb tome as he plans to rebuild our country’s infrastructure.

On Their Own: Women Journalists and the American Experience in Vietnam by Joyce Hoffman. Da Capo Press, $27.50. When the military, the government and newspapers said no way, these women took it as incentive to photograph, write and report from the front lines anyway.

Le Corbusier: A Life by Nicholas Fox Weber. Knopf, $45. Don’t leave it to art history and architecture grad students to read this life of a man whose personal life and buildings spanned Europe and the U.S. in the 20th century.